UNAmusings

I’m currently reading Professor Theodore Kaczynski’s essay “Industrial Society and Its Future”, originally published simultaneously by the New York Times and Washington Post in September 1995 in return for his ending a 17-year terrorist campaign during which he was dubbed ‘The Unabomber’. Setting those crimes aside (he was apprehended seven months later and is currently serving eight consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole), it’s difficult to fault many of his initial assertions that humanity has been deeply damaged by the growth of global industrialisation and that the physical, emotional and mental health of individual citizens has been repeatedly ignored in favour of perpetuating both the industrial system and the social structures which underpin it. I’m only about 5000 words in (out of 35.000), but it’s a challenging treatise which, if anything, touches upon more raw nerves today than when released into a world still largely free from the vice-like grip of the Internet.